How Indian cavalry took Haifa in the last great charge of 1918

By 1918 the machine gun had made cavalry charges look suicidal — on the Western Front, horsemen riding at entrenched guns were slaughtered. So why did it work at Haifa? Part of the answer is ground and speed. The defenders expected an attack down the obvious coastal road, which they had covered with artillery; instead the lancers found approaches across the Kishon river and around the base of Mount Carmel, and used the horse's one great advantage — the ability to cross the killing zone fast. A galloping charge closed the distance in seconds, giving gunners little time to range and reload before the lances were among them. The second reason is that the garrison, though well armed, was part of an army already in retreat and collapse; morale was cracking as the Ottoman front fell apart. The third is simple discipline and nerve: the Jodhpur and Mysore lancers pressed home the charge under fire without breaking, took casualties, and did not stop until the guns were captured. It was a calculated gamble that paid off, not a reckless throwback — the right weapon, the shock of cavalry, used at exactly the moment a shaken enemy could be broken.

Major Dalpat Singh Shekhawat — the Jodhpur Lancers officer who led the charge and was killed at its head; remembered afterwards as the 'Hero of Haifa' and awarded the Military Cross. The Jodhpur Lancers — the Rajput cavalry of the Jodhpur princely state who made the main mounted charge into the town. The Mysore and Hyderabad Lancers — the other regiments of the 15th (Imperial Service) Cavalry Brigade, who cleared the guns on and around Mount Carmel and the Kishon crossing. Captain Aman Singh Bahadur and Dafadar Jor Singh — among those decorated for gallantry with the Indian Order of Merit for their part in the action. General Edmund Allenby — the British commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, whose sweeping Megiddo offensive set the stage and ordered the advance on Haifa. The Ottoman, German and Austrian garrison — the defenders holding Haifa with field artillery and machine guns sited on the heights, part of an army by then in full retreat. Together these were the men, Indian and European, who turned a coastal town below Mount Carmel into the site of one of the war's most remembered cavalry actions.

The scale of Haifa is best grasped in figures. The assault was made by the 15th (Imperial Service) Cavalry Brigade, drawn from three princely states — the Jodhpur, Mysore and Hyderabad Lancers — and delivered on 23 September 1918, the fourth day of Allenby's Megiddo offensive that had opened on 19 September. Armed mainly with lances, sabres and a handful of field guns, the brigade charged the slopes of Mount Carmel and cleared the enemy positions covering the town. Contemporary accounts credit the lancers with taking roughly 1,350 prisoners, among them German and Austrian gunners, together with about 17 artillery pieces and some 11 machine guns. Indian losses were comparatively light for so bold a charge — on the order of eight men killed, including Major Dalpat Singh Shekhawat, several dozen wounded, and a far heavier toll among the horses, many shot down beneath their riders. Two gallantry awards, the Indian Order of Merit, went to Captain Aman Singh Bahadur and Dafadar Jor Singh. In Delhi the Teen Murti Memorial, unveiled in 1922, records the three regiments in bronze.

Behind the celebrated charge were young men from the villages of Rajputana, Mysore and the Deccan — sowars and dafadars who had never seen the sea before sailing to a war on another continent. Many could not read the treaties or grand strategy that had sent them; they rode because their princely rulers had pledged the regiments, and because loyalty, pay and izzat bound them to the colours. At Haifa they crossed a river under fire and galloped into artillery and machine guns; men and horses went down together, and Major Dalpat Singh Shekhawat died at the front of the advance. Those who fell were buried far from home, in soil that would later become Israel, their families back in India learning of it by slow letter. There is a hard honesty in this: their courage was entirely real, and so was the fact that it served an empire that ruled their own country. The same discipline that made them formidable at Haifa was the discipline the British counted on across India. To honour these soldiers fully is to hold both truths at once — the bravery of the individual and the unfreedom of the cause.

Haifa matters because it forces a fuller reckoning with India's part in the First World War — a war in which more than a million Indians served and tens of thousands died, mostly forgotten in the national story because they fought under a foreign flag. Remembering the lancers is a way of returning those men to history without pretending their war was something it was not. The battle also shows how a single event can carry different meanings across time: colonial service in 1918, honoured sacrifice and India-Israel diplomacy in 2018, when Teen Murti Chowk became Teen Murti Haifa Chowk. That is a lesson in how nations choose which pasts to remember and rename. Militarily, Haifa is studied as the last great flourish of the cavalry charge, a tactic already dying — a reminder that courage and timing can still make an old weapon work once, at the edge of its obsolescence. Above all, its legacy is a question about honouring soldiers honestly: how to salute the bravery of men like Dalpat Singh Shekhawat while telling the truth about the empire they served. The best tribute is neither jingoism nor forgetting, but memory that holds the whole, complicated picture.